Welcome to Engage the Mess

We are conjuring alternative futures through the continued legacy of the Black radical imagination, futures where Black and brown bodies can be held, hail, and abundant.

Greetings from far, wide, & in-between! I’m Olivia, a forever learner, a strategist, a freshly minted creative, an abolitionist-in-becoming, and an ancestor-in-progress. I decided to stop waiting for precision and cohesion in order to feel like I had a “right” to create and share my work.

So here is my mess, as I feel my way towards a praxis of actionable abolition. These things that are to be lived out in our businesses and communities. I am black, I am queer, and I am here, invested in identifying the work and getting the job done.

Why subscribe?

Not only are you most welcome to my Substack home, you are necessary to its existence. I need you in my comments; playing, breaking, making sense (or madness) together with me.

Join me in engaging these amorphous, under-seasoned topics vital to bettering future systems needed for cleansing and outlasting the broken ones. Some messes stay messes. And that’s okay. Some take on form in the interpretive act that is play and laughter. In order to imagine queer decolonized futures—opportunities that make life richer and freer—we must first engage the mess. On this journey, your fear is welcome, your confusion is welcome. Our madness lives with us here.

Subscribe to know when you’re ready to engage. Get full access to the newsletter and website.

Come as you are, come as you wish

I invite you to subscribe, but most importantly, I invite you to stay and break bread with the ideas here. Being “inspiring” and “thought provoking” is boring. Messes are only fun when we make them together. So, please, jump into my comment section, debate me, tell me what my writing makes you think of, invite me to your podcast that you may never start. Sharing your mess is okay, too! Is it a place, a feeling, a picture, a book? I want to know. Let’s make a community.